The Most Urgent Queer Political Battles to Fight in 2018

By Gabriel Arana

January 01, 2018

"Before you can be proud, you have to be loud!"

If you’re queer and pay attention to politics, chances are you spent a good portion of 2017 hyperventilating about Donald Trump. He’ll do a bad thing for queer people, say he did the opposite, admit he did it, then say he’s really just protecting us from Vice President Mike Pence, who would have us all hanged. This subtle form of psychological torture — the fact that all our lives hinge on the actions of a spoiled child in a grown man’s body — has been the depressing theme of the past year in politics, and there’s no sign it’ll be any different in 2018.

To make sure you’re prepared for the Orange Grimace’s anti-queer tactics, here’s a primer on the most important political issues we need to pay attention to in the coming year:

Watch transgender rights in the courts like a fierce hawk

While legal rights for gays and lesbians have, for the most part, stood firm in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the administration has launched a full-scale attack on transgender people, who are most at risk because their rights are not as legally secure as gay rights. The administration is packing the federal judiciary with anti-LGBTQ+ appointees as quickly as possible, and the decisions those judges make now could harm the trans community for decades. The courts are currently wrangling over Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the Armed Forces. While trans people will be able to enlist in the military again starting January 1, the well-being of trans folk in and out of the services hangs in the balance in 2018.

Sympathetic lawyers say that existing laws — particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of gender — protect transgender Americans. The Obama administration agreed and enforced trans people’s right to use the bathroom wherever possible, as well as offered trans and gender-nonconforming people some protections from being fired or denied housing because of their identity. Liberal judges were sympathetic; conservative judges were not. Now that Trump has come into office and flipped the script, the Supreme Court has to decide.

In 2017, the Justices took a hard pass on deciding whether existing laws protect trans people. But court-watchers expect them to take the issue up soon. The thing is, queers have an unreliable ally on the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy. He wrote the decision that gave us marriage equality, but he also sympathizes with religious people who say making you a queer cake infringes on their liberty. Also, he’s getting old — if Kennedy retires, it’s likely that whoever replaces him will not be kind towards trans people, so queers have to muster their strength for that fight.

Keep the poor from being denied HIV/AIDS care

Trump and the Republicans’ repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate — the requirement that everyone buy health insurance or pay a tax — means fewer healthy, young people are going to buy insurance in 2018. This will drive up the price of care for everyone else, locking out scores of queers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 13 million Americans will lose health coverage because of the tax cut. Queer folks are already twice as likely as the general population to lack insurance, and this will only make things worse. The poorest members of the LGBTQ+ family, particularly queers of color and transgender people, will be hardest hit, especially when it comes to HIV/AIDS.

To ring in the New Year, Trump fired the remaining members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS (the rest of them quit in protest over the summer). While it’s unclear just how many people the Trump tax cuts will hit, the president’s proposed budget for this year would have also cut HIV/AIDS funding by $800 million, leading to 600,000 new infections by 2020. That’s going to devastate trans women of color and gay men who can’t afford PrEP.

Thanks to public health efforts, HIV infection rates have started to decline for a good swath of LGBTQ+ people. Whether that gets worse or better depends — almost entirely — on whether the Democrats can wrest control of the Senate and House from Republicans in the 2018 midterms. That’s a long time to wait if you need HIV medication.

The Census! The Census! Pay Attention to the Census!

File this one under “small but extremely important”: counting LGBTQ+ Americans in the Census.

Part of the way government allocates resources to its citizens is by knowing who its people are. But the Trump administration has stopped even counting the number of LGBTQ+ citizens in the country. In effect, this makes queers invisible to lawmakers who are drafting legislation. Even if out lesbian and Senator Tammy Baldwin wanted to allocate $100 million to fighting violence against trans women, she wouldn’t be able to point to reliable statistics about how many trans people are in the country, let alone how much violence they face. If queers want the government to do anything for them, we must be armed with information. For the government to fail to keep statistics about the LGBTQ+ community is for them to rob us of our right to advocate for ourselves.

The 2020 Census is two years away, so this issue might take a back seat to more immediate concerns this coming year. But it’s one of the small things Trump has done that will have major consequences later.

Make sure your baker will bake you a queer cake

Few want someone who disapproves of them making their wedding cake, but that’s not the point. LGBTQ+ people have the right to go about our daily lives without having bigots hurt and humiliate us publicly. After decades of calling queers perverts and pedophiles, members of the religious right are now claiming they are the victims of discrimination because they have to tolerate us holding hands in public and viewing two brides or grooms on the top tier of a cake. The Justice Department made that argument in courts all across the country last year, and with Trump loading up the bench with his unquestioning acolytes, they’re more likely to win by the day.

There’s very little chance, at this point, that the courts can take away marriage equality. What’s more likely to happen is that our foes will kill gay marriage with a thousand tiny legal paper cuts. By claiming that queers infringe on their “religious liberty,” bigots of faith are going to try to make that marriage certificate mean as little as possible — they even want to make it so your landlord can kick you out of your apartment if he finds out you’re gay.

Ultimately, politics isn’t just a power game, but an empathy game, too. Besides watching the three branches of government in 2018, queers must win hearts and minds to secure their rights long-term. It’s less about playing respectability politics than forcing the rest of the American public — namely, cisgender straight people — to acknowledge our humanity. To stop LGBTQ+ rights from eroding further in 2018, queers have to do something they’re good at: being vocal so the public remembers we’re under attack when Trump tries one of his diversion tactics.

Remember: before you can be proud, you have to be loud!

Gabriel Arana is a gay writer and editor who lives in New York City. He is a contributing editor at The American Prospect and a contributing writer at Salon.